Rebecca Goldstein - 36 Arguments for the Existence of God

“Mom, what’s the matter with you?”

She was softly crying. He listened to the strange sound of it. Not even his bubbe’s madness-sharpened needling could ever make her break down and cry.

“Mom?”

His heart was pounding now, terrified. Was it Jesse? Was it his father?

“Cass, the Rebbe had a heart attack. He died two hours ago.”

to: GR613@gmail.com

from: Seltzer@psych.Frankfurter.edu

date: Feb. 29 2008 5:00 a.m.

subject:

Just on the chance that my last message didn’t get through to you I’m resending it. Don’t worry about waking me. Just call.

He must have fallen asleep at some point after dawn, since he’s being rudely awakened now into the full brightness of morning. It’s the telephone. He reads the caller ID and sees that it’s Roz and unplugs the receiver and turns over, Lucinda’s pillow muffling his head. The scent of her shampoo has faded over the course of the week.

Now his cell phone is tolling somewhere in the bedroom. With a sigh he gets up and traces the source to his jeans pocket. It’s Roz again. He’s up for the day now, but he doesn’t have the strength yet for Roz. He pulls on the jeans and a sweater and goes downstairs to put up the coffee. He’s feeling shaky from lack of sleep and has a moment of vertigo as he goes downstairs to pick up his Times . He tosses it on the kitchen counter as he pours himself a cup of the dark-roast brew, whose fragrance peps him up before he’s swallowed a mouthful.

His cell phone is vibrating again in his jeans pocket. Roz again, being relentless. He sips his coffee as he skims the headlines and then flips to the Op-Ed page.

His first thought is that he really has fallen back asleep, but now the cell phone is ringing again, and it’s Roz, of course, she must be going out of her mind with her need to reach him, and it only makes sense that she would be going out of her mind-at least, that is, if Cass is not at this moment fast asleep and dreaming bizarrely of the New York Times .

The New York Times

Friday, February 29, 2008

Cosmic Tremblings

By Jonas Elijah Klapper

Safed, Israel

I have watched for some years now, in silence but with mounting dismay, as a small sect has presumed to preach from on high. The sect speaks in the name of the false and hollow god, Scientism, claiming all the dominions under heaven for its faceless revelation. They accuse other faiths of intolerance, yet are contemptuous of all who dare believe that there is more than is dreamt of in parsimonious philosophies. They themselves have been indulgently tolerated, even celebrated, their books bought up at rates to enrich their coffers, their ubiquity a grotesque parody of the presence divine. A rough beast indeed is slouching toward Bethlehem.

For most of my sojourn on Earth my task has been to educate and elucidate. I have seen firsthand how our universities have been corrupted by the triumph of the number crunchers, permitted to crunch the very soul into ashes and dust. The sacred knowledge, preserved in imagery and metaphor, in incantatory language overheard from the higher spheres, has been forgotten, and forgotten, too, the few who remember.

My years as an educator yielded painful and intimate acquaintance with the band of the proud unknowers. Alas, it is to my own pedagogical failure that I painfully confess. Had I succeeded better, then at least one of the men of falsehood would not be laying evil hands on the evisceration of the world soul. Even here in my place of sacred exile I cannot escape his apostasy, the expression of defiance displayed behind plate glass. Betrayal is, of course, one of the stations on the road to redemption.

I have kept my silence, but I can no longer, for there are matters beyond me contending. The masters tell us that there are moments of cosmic trembling, when the future lies in the balance. It is always upon one man that the issue is poised.

The threats to such a one are commensurate with the enormity of what he is asked to do and to be. Every culture and every age has looked to its future and made out his dim form. “I behold him but not near,” says the Hebrew Bible (Numbers 24: 17). He has been called by many names: Ras Tafari, Mahdi, Shiloh, Yinnon, Menachem, Haninah, the Saoshyant, the Hermetic Corpus, the Christ, the Redeemer, the Saviour, the Moshiach, the Messiah, the Anointed, the Son. The names persist even into our day of failing memory.

There have been far more true Messiahs denied than false messiahs proclaimed. He has been born many times. If the moment is right, then he is of the line of David; otherwise he is but another of the line of Joseph, doomed himself to die, incapable of achieving the foretold redemption.

The belief that he tarries is erroneous and is partly to be blamed on the equally fallacious belief that he is required to perform miracles. I do but quote here from Maimonides: “Do not imagine that the anointed King must perform miracles and signs and create new things in the world or resurrect the dead. The matter is not so.”

How then shall he be known? For every age a different attribute is apt. In our day of prodigious forgetting what is more meet than prodigious memory? It is from the faithful rendering of all the world’s words that the Word shall go forth, for in the beginning was the Word.

And how shall the Word go forth? Jesus chose the Mount to deliver his sermon, but Jesus was born, depending on various reckonings, between 8 B.C. and 6 A.D. To Jesus there was but one medium and that was the human voice. Today would it not be felicitous for the Good News to go forth from the newspaper of record? Here then might it be said: I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me.

Cass feels a forceful hand on his shoulder clamping him from behind. He turns back and discovers it’s Sy Auerbach, adorned in his fedora and impatience.

“Seltzer! What are you doing at the end of a line for your own debate? Haven’t I taught you anything?”

“Sy! What are you doing here?”

“I’m here for your smackdown. I’m going to record it and put the transcript and video up on my blog.”

Cass doesn’t voice the first question that comes to mind: What if Fidley flattens him? Will his agent put that up on www.precipice.org?

“How did you even know about this?” is what he asks. He’s pretty sure there hasn’t been any publicity outside of Harvard.

“Roz Margolis told me. She got in touch with me about representing her and mentioned it. She said it was going to be big, but I had no idea.”

“Neither did I.”

“Obviously, or you would have gotten here sooner. Coming through,” he bellows to the people up front. “Cass Seltzer coming through.”

The crowd parts, and a student usher gushes, “Professor Seltzer, we’re so excited, please follow us,” and he enters the beautiful nave of the church, where the whitewashed pews are quickly filling and heads swivel in his direction as he walks down the long center aisle with Sy Auerbach at his side, a red runner under their feet and a simple Protestant cross before their eyes. The immense windows have the shape of the sublime domes that had been carved into the ice on Cass’s night on Weeks Bridge, and the walls are inscribed with the Harvard dead who had been lost in the wars of the twentieth century.

“You see that demented Op-Ed in today’s New York Times ? ” his agent is asking him. “Perfect timing. Coincidence?”

“You mean could he have known about this debate? Unlikely. It was my book that had gotten to him.”